Jobber Outta Nowhere

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When Seth Rollins cashed in his Money in the Bank briefcase on CM Punk at SummerSlam last month, Kate Meizner was at a wedding in Boston. During the reception, Meizner’s bandmate Mike Julius, who she introduced to wrestling by inviting him to watch Bray Wyatt’s House of Horrors match against Randy Orton in 2017, broke the news to her. “He’s a huge wrestling fan because he caught that idiotic match and it really spoke to him,” she says. Now, a cord stretches between their hearts—a cord stretched, too, between the hearts of sweaty men in tight pants getting tangled up in each other.

The present-day overlap between music writers and professional wrestling fans is existent but not loud enough. But the overlap between musicians and professional wrestling fans is even quieter, despite the wrestling industry being bigger than ever in 2025, with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) attracting musicians like Post Malone, Jelly Roll, and Travis Scott, athletes like Tyrese Haliburton and Jalen Brunson, sponsorships from Fortnite and, fuck it, King of the Hill, and ten-figure brand deals from Netflix and ESPN. Even All Elite Wrestling (AEW) has gotten in on the action, putting Shaquille O’Neal and Mike Tyson in the ring and capitalizing on the TikTok fame of the “Costco Guys” AJ and Big Justice. Oh, and Emmy-winner (and, for my money, the best character actor working in Hollywood right now) Paul Walter Hauser recently held a championship belt in Major League Wrestling (MLW). Contemporary indie music, at least publicly, has no interest in sharing any sensibilities with a TV program that is more soap opera than sport.

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Jobber, the Brooklyn-based noise-pop quartet led by Meizner, represents what a good gimmick is—a larger-than-life but believable, ecstatic thing. If you’re a wrestling fan, maybe you’ve also found yourself at odds with the people in your orbit who discredit it as fake or unintelligent. But Meizner’s band isn’t like, say, The Baseball Project, an R.E.M.-spinoff that fills baseball-centric songs with ideas that rarely leave the diamond. On Jobber’s debut album, Jobber To The Stars, wrestling is simply a baseline—a choreographed prop for elevating much more important, real-life conversations, like critiques of anti-capitalism, social and financial inequity, and consumerism. The song “Nightmare” (a subtle reference to Cody Rhodes’ decision to leave the WWE for the indie circuit) is a perfect encapsulation of what it’s like to be stuck under the boot, so to speak, as Meizner’s words—“My back’s nothing but a stepping stone, so you can have all of your precious gems”—concuss like the bottom of a Mexican Destroyer.

But the best wrestling gimmicks, Meizner argues, are the ones where a performer turns their own personality up to an eleven. Think: Bryan Danielson or CM Punk (whose AEW media scrum gets referenced in the title of “GoInG InTo bUsinEsS FoR MySeLf”), these over-the-top artists with cloying, grating, or exaggerated senses of self. “I’ve always been a person that shied away from attention,” she elaborates. “I’ve always been very conscious about not turning myself up to an eleven, out of fear of being too intense. I’m much more comfortable with myself now, but Jobber was the ring where I would be allowed to turn all my thoughts up—and turn up the things I care about most in my personality and my passions.”

The “Jobber” persona gives Meizner the freedom to take her caustic, aggressive, and critical songwriting to a greater extreme—a forum for her to think and embrace her own personal and socio-political crises. On the song “HHH,” she reckons with power and how it affords people a chance to avoid consequence or to hold beliefs that are reprehensible. “I wrote it thinking about the McMahons and their life in Connecticut, and how far away they are, at this point in time, from the realities of grinding it out on the road and the people that they employ.” What plays out is a fictional scenario where Vince McMahon goes out on a “death drive” (written long before McMahon’s actual car crash on the Merritt Parkway in July 2025) and demands his billion-dollar name excuse his abandon (“There is nothing in this world that I cannot fulfill”). “When I think about the crises of the world or of my life through the lens of professional wrestling, really interesting parallels can be drawn,” Meizner says. “What is wrestling if not entirely rooted in human motivations, struggles, and emotions? That’s what makes it so cathartic and relatable.”

MEIZNER STARTED WRITING her own music in high school, but the songs were ramshackle—“high school band songs,” as she puts it. Eventually she joined a hardcore band that would write songs in a “Jack Black in School of Rock style,” doling out responsibilities part by part. Once she got to college, she didn’t feel passionate about anything but music, though she settled for an “impractical degree” in English. “The logical choice,” she reckons, “would have been to major in music and cultivate that and do this thing I know I love. I was like, ‘Maybe I’ll go be a journalist or go into music publicity,’ and find some way to bridge my interests. But then I realized that I don’t actually like writing very much.”

After graduating from college in Western Massachusetts and relocating to New York nearly fifteen years ago, Meizner formed a band called Arm Candy and became its primary songwriter. But it was playing gigs with Snail Mail and Potty Mouth in the late 2010s, standing in the company of seasoned musicians, that gave her the grace and motivation to “push her own boundaries.” “I was inspired to try writing again and try a different approach with it and treat it more like a craft than just an outpouring of emotion,” she recalls. There, Jobber started to form. But of course, I ask Meizner if she ever brushed shoulders with the John Cena faithful while at school in Massachusetts (the wrestler-turned-actor was born in West Newbury). “I don’t think I encountered a ton of wrestling fans,” she remembers. “People were into Dinosaur Jr. and the Red Sox.” Meizner herself wasn’t even watching wrestling at that point, returning to the sport in the summer of 2014, around the time The Shield disintegrated.

Though she’s a rock musician by night, Meizner’s dayjob is far less public-facing. She works in UX for an e-commerce marketplace that, while I won’t disclose its name, is what she believes to be one of the last tech-adjacent jobs not linked to war crimes. After finishing graduate school and joining her current profession full-time, Meizner began using all of her PTO to tour with Potty Mouth and the band Hellraiser, Jobber drummer Michael “Judd” Falcone’s other project. “I was writing songs here and there,” she admits, “but I felt like I could never just get enough time to myself, between work and touring, to form my own band and commit to it and stick to it.”

At the end of 2017, after a Snail Mail tour, Meizner returned to New York and wrote seven songs, four of which appeared on Jobber’s 2022 EP Hell In A Cell. “I felt like all of it had built up, in years being in other people’s projects, that I just combusted,” she says. “I couldn’t help but continue to write songs, even though I didn’t know what Jobber was going to be. I didn’t know what to do with them, but I had this idea in the van: I was like, ‘I want to do a wrestling-themed band.’ I’m obsessed with wrestling, I love finding the parallels between it and real life.” While working on the EP, she sent Mick Foley—AKA “Mankind,” the wrestler who made the Hell In A Cell match infamous—a camero request. Disguised as a friend of the band, she wrote: “Hey, my friends have this band. They’re called Jobber, they’re wrestling themed. Can you cut this heel promo on them?” In the video he sent back, Foley wore his Mankind mask and called Jobber’s music “graceful and distasteful.” “But then I felt bad,” Meizner says, “because I’m obviously not a friend of the band. So Mike [Falcone] mixed [the cameo] with crowd noise and very shoddily tried to make it sound like a promo he was cutting in the ring.”

The name Jobber was in Meizner’s head from the beginning, before she even committed to a wrestling theme. “I’ve always been a person who does the most—a little too much, some would say. I give 120-percent and I was finally like, ‘What if I just went all the way and used wrestling as a songwriting exercise for what I write about and the genre I approach. It gave me an entire world to explore.” She met one of her bandmates (though she won’t disclose which, in order to preserve his online anonymity) on Twitter via his content about New York City indie rock, wrestling, and leftist political theory. After she invited him to her WrestleMania party in 2016, they became fast, real-life friends, bonding over the WWE’s then-frustrating push of “Big Dog”-era Roman Reigns and the storms of crowd boos raining on him each night.

JOBBER TO THE STARS is an album written at a crossroads. Meizner, who is thirty-five years old now, has lived in New York for the last fourteen and tells me that she’s reached the point where the next chapter of her life is unclear. “This pressing, almost suffocating feeling, like something in my life needs to change, I know a lot of people my age are facing this restlessness and feeling stir-crazy,” she explains. “When you have a career, or you’re in a long-term relationship, you have things tying you to a place. I think that humans naturally crave novelty, and that’s where that restlessness comes from. You’re so rooted and embedded. I felt this wanderlust, after getting stuck in my own habits and routines, and forgot where I was.” The isolation of COVID-19 certainly played a role in her disillusionment, as did a “few hard winters,” but Meizner saw her world shrinking. And the solutions she was grasping at—therapy, new career paths, hobbies—weren’t keeping her alive, either.

So Meizner went to stay with her aunt in Los Angeles for a month. “I felt very healthy,” she says. “My body is not built for a New York winter, even though I grew up in New England. It was like a manufactured expansion of my world by virtue of moving and being in a new place.” She had decided to leave New York for good, and the songs she wrote reflected that in a breakup sort of way. “Jobber To the Stars Pt. 1” captures that feeling, especially when Meizner sings, “Take the train and head downtown, aimless wandering around, to feel alive or to remember where I am.” And a song like “Extreme Rules” reaches for that in a more overt way, especially when Meizner writes about the “sharp objects” that are well-concealed beneath the ring and how she “can’t feel the pain if I can’t see.”

And while her burnout from living in a “barely livable professional town” like New York explodes on “Raw Is War,” the Minutemen-honoring “Jobber To the Stars Pt. II” projects a story about Meizner’s imagined life in LA and her “coming to terms with the fact that, just because I’m trying to move to a new place, it might not solve all of my problems.” The double entendre of the Jobber To The Stars title is ever-prescient. On one hand, it can be a nod to wrestling’s kayfabe template of superstars taking time off by “going to Hollywood to film a movie.” But Meizner also wanted to play around with its more colloquial identity, a “jobber” being someone who’s hired to make the main-eventers look good. “Oftentimes, in my jobs working at big corporations, or my relationships with the bands I’ve played in, I almost felt like a Jobber to the stars,” she says. “It’s like reckoning with the reality that the way you imagine things is not necessarily the way it’s going to be. I imagine myself sitting alone in my car, in traffic, not having any friends. Or I’m sitting on a beach while I’m having an anxiety attack instead of my apartment.”

Jobber To The Stars is a clever, hedonistic, and batshit obliteration of the “be the change you want to see” posturing that oozes out of most liberal songwriting. And that comes from the lived-in experience of being exploited and pummeled by institutional power. When she started her music career, Meizner was broke, threatened by student loan debt and her inability to detach herself from the identity of employment. “Clothesline From Hell” is about trying to find that healthy detachment, be it through labor organizing or prioritizing self-care in the workplace. “I’ve had to reconcile—I feel very deeply, mentally unwell and unhealthy when I am thinking about work all the time,” she says. “Even in the context of labor organizing, how do I maintain that thing I care about and continue doing it but also stay healthy in the process? The whole point is to reduce suffering through better labor practices, and I firmly believe now that one does not necessarily need to suffer to make that happen. As my point of view evolves, the songs take a different shape.”

And those songs took shape at Sonelab in Easthampton, where Meizner, Falcone, and Justin Pizzoferrato recorded Jobber To The Stars mostly alone, and Studio G in Brooklyn, with the help of Aron Kobayashi Ritch. She tells me that the first part of those sessions were difficult, because she couldn’t “turn her brain off” after arranging and producing. “By the end of a multi-day recording session, I would be fried for the next two, three weeks,” she remembers. “I would sleep 10 hours a night, I would get migraines.” Eventually, Julius started attending sessions and lending guitar contributions to Meizner’s writing. “He was chasing the tones so I didn’t have to. I actually had time to step outside, walk around, and eat lunch, rather than think about something that was happening in the studio.” The sludgy lead in “Pullman’s Got a Gun,” for example, wouldn’t sound like that without Julius’ interpretation of it, as would the additions from bassist Miles Toth, which upscale the songs’ deliveries, like the Rentals-inspired “Nightmare,” which swoons in bursts of fuzzy power-pop and a frog splash of distortion.

Jobber To The Stars, despite the poetry-in-motion source material it tugs at, is not musical theater, and Meitzer worked hard to make her references as oblique as possible. A composer for a TV show she likes (but does not name, as it’s her guilty pleasure; “I keep that, that’s for me only”) said something that struck a chord within her: “He was saying that writing songs with the story in mind, being too literal, focusing on the listener learning something and spoon-feeding that idea—it can often be very limiting. I think a lot of that principle can apply to songwriting, too. I don’t go in with a set of parameters so much as an idea and then massage the connection and figure out what is going on within me as I’m writing these songs.”

ONE OF THE BIGGEST THINGS I’ve had to grapple with, as a queer person who loves WWE, is that the company does not nurture its rather large base of LGBTQ+ supporters. The stereotype is there, that wrestling is low-brow, straight-man entertainment. And of course, the company (especially its mothership, TKO) is doing its best to pander to the manosphere and MAGA grifters while alienating the women and Black men it employs. Paul Levesque (AKA “Triple H”), WWE’s chief content officer, has been a constant and obvious supporter of Donald Trump, whose well-documented relationship to Vince McMahon spans decades. Even further, Vince’s wife (and Levesque’s mother-in-law), Linda, is the incumbent Secretary of Education. This is a conversation I’m having more and more, reignited by Brock Lesnar’s recent return to the company after being named in Janel Grant’s sex trafficking lawsuit against Vince McMahon last year. I ask Meizner if she finds herself reckoning with that, with a thing she loves being an enabler of cruelness? “Is it contradictory, to be a leftist and support a company disinterested in keeping their links to softcore fascism behind closed doors?”

“Wrestling is so extreme in its portrayal of that that it goes beyond the insidiousness,” she says. “Everyone knows the music industry is just as bad in practice, but it might not be as overt. Triple H going and doing a promotional video with Trump to support the reinitiation of the Presidential Fitness Test is such an overt level of support for fascism—the type of thing where I’m like, ‘I don’t want to write about this promotion anymore.’ But the reality is that, you cannot look at the history of wrestling—and the development and evolution of wrestling—without very closely looking at WCW and WWE, formerly WWF. A lot of the themes that I end up exploring are pulled from history, but I wouldn’t say it’s an endorsement. My friend once said, ‘Trust no large company.’ I think remaining skeptical is important, whether you work in the non-profit field, a tech company, the medical field, or the entertainment industry.”

While Meizner’s favorite wrestlers, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Brian Pillman, are as dead as the eras they worked in, it doesn’t mean that her affections for the past alleviate her frustrations with the industry’s present. “I definitely have trouble grappling with the WWE and its point of view and its association with fascism right now,” she admits, before offering a consolation: “But I think this is a very good time for wrestling, as well. You’re not going to get rid of the history and influence that Vince McMahon and the WWE have had on wrestling. But right now, there’s a ton of alternatives that you can go to. I’m happy to have other promotions that I can tune into, like Queer Punk Outlaws in New York City, and support the locals and indies. There are other places to direct your attention right now, but I do think it’s unrealistic to have a wrestling-themed band and not inevitably draw on its references from the past. You can’t undo that, but acknowledging that there’s other promotions that are not associated with fascism and are actively against it—there’s other places to look, and it’s a good time to be a wrestling fan.”

Another salve, at least for now, is that value-alignment does exist in the WWE. Cody Rhodes has taken pictures holding trans flags, CM Punk has attended anti-ICE rallies, and both Becky Lynch and Sami Zayn have expressed their solidarity with Palestine by supporting others who’ve spoked out against the ongoing genocide and wearing the State’s colors on nationally-televised programs. Everyone is beholden to capitalism and its profit-minded warmongering, at least to some degree, but the gestures made in good faith by a few are so much louder when the men lording over your employment are bending their knees to tyrannical demigods. To quote Meizner in “Pillman’s Got a Gun,” “the colors feel vivid when you’re watching.”

And while WWE’s recent ignorance of Pride Month and Black History Month has been especially disenfranchising, Meizner is quick to point out that any publicly traded corporation’s attempts to embrace progressive politics are going to be sanitized, thinly-veiled money-grabs anyway. The WWE’s neglect simply confirms age-old suspicions—and is sung into truth by Meizner on “Summerslam” (“It’s easy to sell out someone you’ll never know”)—because taking away that representation and punctuating it by firing marginalized performers eschews a percentage of the people helping keep the company’s lights on. The bottom line these Fortune 500 ghouls with price-tags hanging from their teeth are trying to sell us is that the people they’ve othered aren’t worthy investments. But if you go back to professional wrestling’s DIY beginnings, you will find the purest black-and-white storytelling, that there are babyfaces and there are heels. The bad guys may lie, cheat, and steal their way up the ladder, but it’s the good guys who always come out on top. Capitalism will get its licks in, but you can still defy the naval-gazing venture capitalists who bargain for junk food stickers on broken tables. You can still survive. And that’s because Jobber said so.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

Jobber Outta Nowhere

Kate Meizner spoke with Paste about using wrestling as a tool for leftist songwriting, reckoning with the WWE’s ties to fascism, becoming disillusioned by New York City, and her band’s new album, Jobber To The Stars.